Being a Customer-Focused Organization

In a session entitled "Want to Thrive? Listen to Your Users," Rick Pifer of the Wisconsin Historical Society talked about what it means to be a customer-focused organization.

To be customer-service oriented:

• Think about what we can do that will make it easier for the users to do what they want to do,
• The old paradigm of waiting for patrons to come to us and use our materials on our terms is fading and our users are declining, so we need to be more customer-focused,
• We need to build a reputation for being product-centered, sales-focused, and efficient,
• Use a customer satisfaction model, based on what the customer wants and needs.

Some easy tools the Wisconsin Historical Society has employed to find out what their customers want include giving a 3x5 card to every user and asking them what would have made their visit better, and using a simple questionnaire after each workshop to find out what the attendees liked about the workshop and what they would like to see different.

The rest of this session consisted of two talks on user studies. Judit Olah, a consultant, talked about all the various types of user studies one can conduct, and the pros and cons of each. Alexis Braun Marks of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History discussed doing user studies on a shoestring.